Ranting to /dev/null

Talk about surreal

Really strange experience tonight. Before seeing the new Superman movie (10-second review: mildly entertaining, mildly yawn-inducing), I saw a girl working at the theater who went to church with me whilst I was in high school. Back then, I always got the impression that there was more to her than she was letting on: she always seemed as if she had a secret.

I wondered what she'd been up to these past six or seven years.

Turns out she's been up to two counts of corruption of minors for "inappropriate conduct" with high school students while a math teacher in the crash-course certification program.

The weird thing is that from her looks, she shouldn't have had any trouble finding someone her own age to fool around with. You read all of these teachers-messing-with-students stories in the news, but you never think you'll actually know one of them.

I'm still freaked out. As evidenced by the fact that this is posted at 3:21 AM.

The weather

I don't usually blog about things quite so banal as the weather, but...

My area just received 4" of rain in a 24 hour period. That's nothing next to the 7-odd inches that fell in the Washington, DC area.

What a mess.

Revoke the New York Times press credentials

The NRO has an op-ed calling for the revocation of the New York Times press credentials as punishment for exposing the legal intelligence gathering being done by the government in international financial institutions.

I think they're right. The Times, which cried unbelievably foul when a minor CIA functionary's identity was exposed, has no qualms about exposing critical anti-terrorism intelligence programs, even ones which are completely and unambiguously legal. They're out to get the administration by any means necessary. And it's time they were punished.

Kick the bums out.

I want one

IBM has, with Georgia Tech, demonstrated a chip operating at 500GHz. The "catch" is that they supercooled the little bastard to 4.5 degrees Kelvin (-451F). When at room temperature, the 200mm chip - which is a little big for an ATX case, I'll admit - ran at only 350GHz.

Umm. Yes, please.

Now that's just asking for it

The Episcopal church, as if it didn't have enough difficulties at the moment, has appointed a leader who says that homosexuality isn't sinful. Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori will take office later in the year.

I mean, come on people. Are you trying to get kicked out of the church?

What makes the whole thing even slimier is that the liberal wing of the church is using the fact that she's a woman to belittle anyone who disagrees with her. The Canadian Primate Andrew Hutchinson said "Having a chief consecrator who is a woman may be a difficulty for some of you."

Yeah. That's the real issue.

In related news, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, seems to recommend that the Church of England not ordain woman bishops. His reasoning is a little odd, and seems mostly to turn on the assertion that "Rome won't like us if we do this". Not exactly the most direct of arguments, but I'll take it. Whatever else he may be, his dedication to the unity of the church is admirable.

New GoogleMaps function

It doesn't exist yet, but I think it should. What I want to be able to do is fire up GoogleMaps, but instead of entering an address and being taken to a location, navigate to a location and have it tell me an address.

From there, it should be able to provide all the information one would get from a reverse address search, i.e. name (person or business as appropriate) and phone number. This latter info wouldn't be available if the number is unlisted. But the address information should be.

I think adding this functionality is more a matter of interface and databasing than collecting new data. It's already there, I just want a different way of accessing it.

Money, as such, doesn't buy happiness...

Study after study has confirmed this.

But that isn't the point. Money doesn't buy happiness, but having more money than you, certainly does.

People in developing countries without regular access to such essentials as sanitary water tend to describe themselves as happy at similar rates to those of us who live in more civilized climes. Money as such isn't the deciding factor. It's having more than your neighbors.

As I say, money isn't everything, but it does make everything easier.

Do you like dictatorship and corruption?

If so, then you need to up your support for Third World aid.

About $2.3 trillion dollars has been spent on aid to the developing world over the past 50 years, and nations who received aid tended to experience exactly the same economic growth as nations that did not, developed or otherwise.

However, nations that receive aid are much more likely to be ruled by anti-democratic strongmen.

Conclusion? Foreign aid does more harm than good.

Reliable data

The "Economic Policy Institute" has released a "study" indicating that Wal-Mart can raise wages without raising retail prices.

Yep. That's what they said.

They recommend that Wal-Mart slash its profits by 20% in order to raise the wages of their employees. Wal-Mart ran a 3.6% margin last year. They want to send it back to 2.9%.

2.9%!!?!!!???! DOWN from 3.6%

Granted, 3.6% of $315 billion is still an $11 billion profit at the end of the year, but, a savings account pays better than that. You can get a good 4.75% without much looking around. Wal-Mart is making a razor-thin profit here. They make less on a yearly basis Citigroup with four times the revenue (Citigroup pulled in 16.42% of $76 billion). Any less than 3% profitibility and you have to ask whether or not it's worth doing business at all. At that point it's a better investment to just buy a municipal bond and get the tax break.

The other thing they don't tell you is that the EPI is really a front group for organized labor. The Chairman of the Board is Gerald W. McEntee, the president of a massive government employees' union. The board also includes the president of United Steelworkers, United Auto Workers, and Andy Stern of the SEIU (godfather of Wal-Mart Watch). That's obviously the group of people to whom I would turn if I wanted to know how to run a business properly.

New urban environs

Been meaning to write this post for a while, but somehow haven't felt like it. The main focus is on a new shopping "village" I encountered while on vacation in early June. The catalyst for the actual post is a series of articles forwarded to me by someone in a PR firm that sends on articles to bloggers. In short, I'll be writing about some trends in the construction of urban spaces. If that's the kind of thing you'd like to spend your time reading, here we go.

The "village" I saw on vacation was called "Freshfields Village" . The linked map shows it while it was still under construction, but the basic footprint is exposed.

Here are a few pictures. Note the wide sidewalks and relatively narrow streets:

This street is narrower than it looks as the whole right lane is parking:

Some areas are clearly designed to be accessible only to pedestrians:

There's also a nice green space in the center, upon which a service was held at noon on Memorial Day:

Freshfields, as I shall refer to this thing from now on, is located at the only road headed into two resort islands near Charleston, SC: Seabrook and Kiawah. The traffic circle you can see under construction on the map is the only way to get into either community. To give you an idea the kind of resort communities we're talking about, I'm just going to list the car brands that the village dealership offers: Porsche, Mercedes, Land Rover, Bentley, Maybach, and Infiniti. Umm, yeah. I didn't know there were Bentley or Maybach dealers.

It's obvious from walking around that the entire village is designed to feel like an old-fashioned, down-to-earth, late-19th to mid-20th century town with the requisite square. It's even got a "drug store" which is more like 75% soda fountain. The parking lots surround the village and are generally not visible from any of the storefronts. But unlike a normal town, the number of people who can actually walk to any of the stores is almost zero. The nearest residences on either island are a good two miles away. Which means that walking down in the morning to have a cup of coffee at the local coffeeshop is entirely doable if you don't mind spending 30 minutes walking. And if you want to use their wireless, you've got to carry your laptop. The stores also sell plenty of things which you obviously aren't expected to transport by foot: 12 packs of beverages, frozen meats, canoes, sets of golf clubs, etc.

In short, the environment is almost entirely a replica. We're talking 100% artiface here. To show you just how thinly this is veiled, let me tell you about the grocery store. It's called "Newton Farms", and has a Starbucks inside the thing. The building resembles an agriculture warehouse on the outside, and the rafters are all exposed, giving a sense of very large space when you go in. The produce is all displayed in wooden crates or high-end refrigeration units. The deli sports any number of prepared salads, marinated cuts of meat, immaculately decorated cakes, etc. And every morning, the Piggy Wiggly truck drives up to stock them for the day, Newton Farms being a division of what has got to be one of the lowest-rent supermarkets in the south.

But you know what? The whole experience is really, really pleasant. Yep, it's fake. Yep, the vast majority of the people who work in the supermarket probably can't afford to shop there [in another interesting touch, the vast majority of them are also black]. Yep, you can tell that this is designed to be appealing for the people who drive $150,000 cars to their $5 million homes. Yep, you can tell that the carefully constructed storefronts designed to resemble mixed-use arrangements seen in urban areas nationwide contain nothing of the sort. But hell, I'll take it. It feels a lot nicer than your local strip mall with the parking lot in the center of everything.

Which leads to the aforementioned articles. One is entitled "In Praise of Ordinary Choices", the other "How Sprawl Got a Bad Name", and both are from the current issue of The American Enterprise, which is admittedly a self-consciously pro-business publication. That being said, the current issue, "Attack of the Snobs", is quite insightful, and echoes a lot of the themes described in Nation of Rebels.

In short, the most voiciferous opponents of "sprawl" are almost always those who stand to lose the most from urban growth, sometimes financially, but more often than not simply aesthetically. The author names several prominant anti-Wal-Mart groups as evidence. "Wal-Mart Watch" is a pet project and funded heavily by the SEIU, which has been trying to unionize Wal-Mart for years. The group itself is as blue and blue-blooded as they come. "[Wal-Mart Watch] is run by a clutch of political hacks, including John Kerry's 2004 campaign manager and other Kerry and Democratic National Committee strategists. And the other biggest attack squad, WakeUpWalMart, is steered by the political adviser to Howard Dean's 2004 campaign. So give Wal-Mart credit for creating lots of high-paying jobs for otherwise unemployable individuals."

Others, be they urban planners, historians, sociologists, or political activists, are so opposed to the aesthetics of urban growth that most of them don't appear to have noticed that most people actually like shopping at Wal-Mart, or, more to the point, will voluntarily choose to do so if given the opportunity. And so by opposing any kind of urban growth (Let's be honest hear and recognize that anyone who says they want "smart growth" almost certainly means they want no growth at all) they are effectively denying access to urban amenities that they almost certainly already possess. Center-city dwellers can afford to try and block the construction of a new Wal-Mart or shopping center in a town in which they do not live because they don't need to shop there.

There's another group of people who tend to be against urban growth: those who live on the edges of urban areas. These people are immediately impacted by such growth, so there's some good reasons for their interest. But in a sense, they're doing the same thing. They moved out of the city - a clear plurality if not an actual majority - to have the amenities provided by suburban/rural areas: open spaces, minimal traffic, etc. And now that they've got theirs, they want to make sure that no low-down city slicker is going to come in with their housing development or shopping center or highway and take it away from them. This, it strikes me, is not a particularly good motive either. Especially when a lot of the loudest complainers paid next-to-nothing for their properties that are now located next to half-million dollar homes. Again, the primary motivation is not ideological, or even financial, but purely aesthetic. It's also a means of protecting one's social investments. There's no cache in living in an exclusive or otherwise low-population area if people move there.

Bringing this back to the nominal focal point of the post, it seems to me that many of the objections to more sprawl-like urban growth are cause by either aesthetic snobbery or selfishness. Most people say they don't like sprawl, but most people also spend money in ways that encourage it. This is not a rational exercise, and suggests to me that people like sprawl a lot more than they say they do. The mentality seems to be "I don't want them to build a Wal-Mart in my city, but I'll go there if they do."

The solution, should you decide to come out against sprawl, is not to tweak your spending habits or be stubborn about driving downtown rather than to the mall to better patronize local businesses. That ultimately doesn't matter for one of two reasons: either you already live downtown and consume the urban amenities that are there for your consumption, or you live in a suburb, and your very dwelling establishes you as a proponant of urban growth.

Sprawl isn't other people's fault. It's yours. And you know what? It's not that bad.

Three year anniversary

Looks like I just passed the three-year mark for this blog. Just under a thousand entries with well over two thousand comments. Frequency ranges from four or five posts a day to two-week droughts. But I've blogged at least every month since June 2003.

I'd like to think that my writing has improved at least marginally over time, but I'm not sure it has. There may be a few ideas I espoused early in the history of this site which I don't necessarily still promote, though I think I've been pretty consistent about the war. I do detect a trend away from technology and towards politics though. My interest in economics has also apparently been on a bit of an upswing.

I've largely kept personal info away from the site, a practice I shall probably continue. Those of you who actually want to hear more about my life are encouraged to ask. Email works.

On to year four, 2006-7. Here goes nothing. I'm just glad my first year in law school doesn't conincide with a presidential election...

Apple vs. the vikings

The Scandinavian nations are saying that unless Apple opens up iTunes and its associated proprietary formats to use by other mp3 players, they're going to shut it down. "Ultimately Apple can be put out of business," says one Thorgeir Waterhouse with the Norwegian Consumer Council.

Fat change. First, Apple fights in court. If they win, they win. If they lose, they simply stop doing business in Norway. Whoop-de-freaking-doo. That'll make European regulatory nonsense really popular.

Ain't it the truth

Now this is cool

This morning I discovered StateMaster, a site with dozens of statistics ranked by state.

This we can conclude from these stats:

1) DC is a statistical outlier with some really bizarre dynamics. How else could we have a "state" with the highest per capita income and the fourth highest poverty rate? I'm thinking it just has to do with the fact that n is very small.

2) Mississippi and Louisiana really suck. They aren't at the top or bottom of all of these lists, but they consistantly rank near the worst of anything you care to examine.

3) All those scare tactics about STDs you heard in high school are a load of crap. Why? Because even the most common STDs barely register as a percentage. Chlamydia is most common, at a maximum of .6%, average of .3%. Gonorrhea clocks in at a maximum of .26%, average of .01%. Syphilis shows up at a maximum of .03% with an average of .001%. There aren't listed stats for HIV infection, because an unknown number of people who are HIV positive never show any symptoms of the infection. But there is an death rate, and it's low. Average of .005%. Herpes rates aren't listed. possibly because 60-90% of us already have it and never show symptoms. Conclusion? 1) We're supposed to be scared of this, why? 2) Notice that Louisiana and Mississippi suck, again.

3) Renting out a property you own isn't a sure thing. Related, renters are more likely to spend a bigger percentage of their income on rent/utilities than mortgagers. It is not, however, possible to conclude that renting is for this reason more expensive than mortgaging, because renters might just be poorer than owners and use a higher percentage of their income on the same expenditures.

4) Almost no one dies from gun violence. We're talking an average of 11.5 people per 100,000.

I don't know how they managed it

...but WORLD Magazine, not exactly a publication I associate with quality journalism (or even quality prose most of the time) has landed an exclusive with...

Christopher Hitchens.

Good stuff. They ask the obvious questions, but Hitch doesn't give the obvious answers:

HITCHENS: "I don't have the nostalgia for the lost period of faith. I'm glad it's over and my children won't have to know about it. Except from me."

WORLD: From you?

HITCHENS: I teach them this stuff and they don't know what I think.

WORLD: How do you teach them without them knowing what you think?

HITCHENS: You are not educated if you don't know the Bible. You can't read Shakespeare or Milton without it, even if there was nothing else of it. And with the schools now, that's what I hate about secular relativism. They're afraid of insurance liability. They don't even teach it as a document. They stay out of the whole thing to avoid controversy. So kids can't quote the King James Bible. That's terrible..."